


Magpies

by dewinter



Category: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
Genre: Betrayal, Grief/Mourning, M/M, University
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 18:33:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5466818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dewinter/pseuds/dewinter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>One for sorrow; two for joy.</i> </p>
<p>Jim and Bill and secrets, never to be told.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Magpies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [M_Leigh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/M_Leigh/gifts).



The forest ends two miles out from the Nursery. Jim’s pushing his way through brackeny undergrowth, ivy-choked tree trunks and fallen leaf mulch, brambles snagging at his jumper and mud spattering his boots, and then the forest clears, abruptly, and gives way to fields. He’s on a ridge, and the knobbled furrows stretch away from him, downhill towards dark hedgerows.

He’s been moving at a fair lick – not running; the forest’s too thick for that, and besides, the running is over now – but fast enough that when he stops on the ridge, he’s panting. Early autumn; misty breath.

There are sirens in the distance, clear on the cold air.

He has miles to go before he reaches the car, parked discreetly in a secluded layby. And night is falling. But he stands still for several minutes, sweat clamming in his armpits, the strap of his rifle rubbing across his shoulder. He tries to think of nothing. The bullet wound in his back throbs.

Was Bill thanking him, with that last almost-smile? A mercy-killing, or vengeance: Jim has time yet, to work out the difference. There are birds in the barren field, picking their way among the tractor-tracks and the broken haystalks.

Three crows, a lone robin worrying at a worm not seven feet from where Jim is standing.

And magpies, black and blue and white against the dull frosted earth.

How did that old rhyme go?

_One for sorrow. Two for joy._ Watching his mother boil milk. Not yet tall enough to reach the stovetop, hiding his face in her apron. _One for sorrow. Seven for a secret._ Like all the old nursery rhymes, sweet and banal on the surface; morbid and foreboding underneath.

Humpty-Dumpty, smashed beyond repair. Ring a ring o’ roses, plagued and festering. Wednesday’s child, full of woe. Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor: cherry stones, rotten apples. Magpies, counted down with sorrow and secrets.

Jim counts down, to stop himself thinking about how neat and small the bullet-hole was - just a tiny inconsequential smudge of a thing, small enough to be wiped away with the side of his thumb, tenderly.

*

_One for sorrow_

He has some time before evensong. Mr Smiley and his owlish, slow gaze are gone, returned to their hiding place under the crooked noses of the Circus, and Jim is listening to the wind buffet the flimsy caravan, and thinking.

The names by which he knew them were false, of course. He was not really Ellis, and they were not really Andras or István or Olga or Kazimir.

He knew nothing about them – not their birthdays or the names of their children or if they were from Budapest or Debrecen or Miskolc or some tiny countryside enclave, or whether they were hopeful for the future, or were simply counting the days until something blew – the network or the bomb.

They were strangers to him. Ciphers on a page, items in an encoded ledger deep in the Circus archives, and yet he can remember, piercingly clear – although Karla and his cronies tried to fry it out of his brain with electrodes and white noise – Olga’s tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth, magnifier clamped to her eye, the steady breathing and glacial blinking of a forger. Andras picking peas out of his stew. Tiny, intimate habits no amount of training could undo. István saying, cigarette between his finger and his thumb, out of the blue, _you know Dr Hook, Ellis? I like this band very much, very good band, top notch._

Kazimir was the youngest. He had known nothing but Communism. Born under a sickle and a star. Jim knows – or trusts, the last refuge left to him – that the others would have bargained for him. Swapped secrets for his life, or at least for a quick, clean death.

Jim, alone in his caravan with the wind howling and the kerosene lamp guttering, can’t stop his mind conjuring up the look in Kazimir’s eyes at that final moment. How it must have been: surprise, utter disbelief that it was to end like this. Ungloriously, in a basement or a forest clearing or a crumbling factory or whatever squalid grave they considered fitting for Control’s scattered, foolish eyes and ears. Scalps; hunted.

Jim turns his collar up against the quickening storm and trudges up to the school, into the light. _Then sings my soul, my Saviour God, to thee._ The pipe organ is wheezy, and the boys reluctant, mumbling, but it scarcely matters. The effect is the same: tightened throat, prickling eyes.

He thought they’d stripped away his emotions in that echoing, tiled room. Drowned out the remnants of feeling with constant, spine-chilling screams, piped directly into his brain. He was almost thankful for it. He thought they’d flushed away what Bill deigned to leave him of his heart, down the drain with the blood and the skin from the beds of his fingernails. 

But the boys are singing _when Christ shall come, with shout of acclamation, and take me home, what joy shall fill my heart,_ and Jim’s eyes are stinging, for Olga, and Andras, and István, and for Kazimir, and for Jim, for Ellis, who shared stale coffee and desperate, heart-in-mouth moments with them, whatever their names were, and could not save them, in the end. _How great thou art._

*

_Two for joy_

‘You came!’ Jim says, and it comes out more elated than he intended. He is short of breath – one of his ribs is badly bruised, and he has a gash over one eye that is beginning to throb, now the rush of victory is subsiding.

‘Of course I did,’ Haydon says. Jim will not pluck up the courage to call him _Bill_ for several weeks, and Jim will insist on _James_ until at least halfway through Hilary – a vain attempt to play at dignity, to fit in with the slick city boys. Whose suits are new, but whose gowns are old, handed down from fathers and grandfathers whose legacies are etched into college stone.

Haydon is the slickest of all. Jim realised it the moment he saw him at his tutor’s salon the night before, breathtaking in his confidence, slouching with his hands in his pockets while he chatted with a don whose work was so revered that Jim could barely believe he was still alive.

And here he is, now, his navy and claret scarf jarringly untidy against the sharp lines of his great coat. His oxfords gleam in the churned-up turf.

‘I said I would, didn’t I?’ Haydon continues. He ducks his head to light a cigarette. Jim’s heart thuds uncomfortably.

‘Made a bit of a hash of that last scrum,’ he says, still gasping slightly. Sweat and mud sharp in his nostrils.

‘It looked rather good to me, old chap,’ Haydon says, although they spent much of the previous evening – the first of their acquaintance – discussing Haydon’s singular and exclusive devotion to cricket.

‘Well, always good to have some support. Must stand you a pint when I’m next over your side of town.’ Jim caught sight of Haydon, standing impassively near the halfway line, near the end of the first half, and promptly fell over in surprise. The mud caked on his thighs is beginning to dry, and it itches.

This is how it will go, with Haydon; he can sense it. He will be messy, and dirty, and breathless, and Haydon will be insouciant and pristine, his composure relentlessly, unfairly intact. Sharp suits and sharp words. He knows how it will go, and he does not care.

*

_Three for a girl_

1961, and Jim is in Connie’s office. It is dark and filled with smoke, as ever. Connie is expressing her hatred of her Christian name, as ever.

‘As though it were a desirable quality in a person.’ She exhales a plume of smoke. ‘In a woman,’ she says, as an afterthought. ‘I knew a girl called Chastity, once. Can you imagine?’

Jim cannot.

‘Constance. Damn fools, my parents were.’ Connie taps her cigarette angrily on the edge of her saucer. ‘Are you the same boy you were at seventeen? Hell, at thirty?’

Jim smiles. ‘A little wiser, maybe. A little sadder. A little softer around the middle. The ravages of time, Connie.’ He runs a hand over his head, where his hair is beginning to thin. ‘They leave their mark, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Oh, _come,_ Jim,’ Connie says fondly. ‘Always so tragic. My poor Basset hound boy.’

Jim laughs. ‘I always was morose. That much hasn’t changed.’

Connie pauses a few seconds, and says, gently, ‘have you seen anything of Bill recently?’

Jim takes a moment to reply. ‘Not really. He’s been in Leipzig for weeks. And he’s got a new girl.’

‘Ah, yes. Lamplighter, I heard.’

‘Toby says she’s brilliant.’

Connie raises her eyebrows. ‘Then it must be true.’

‘She wears slacks, apparently.’

‘We’ll have none of that filthy talk in here, Jim Prideaux.’

Jim laughs. ‘I’m only passing on what I’ve heard. I forget her name.’

Connie pulls open the bottom drawer of her desk and begins rummaging. ‘Wonder what her wpm is? Not like Bill to branch out from the typing pool. Ah!’ She pulls out a bottle of Glenfiddich and an empty Robertson’s jar. She started drinking during the Suez Crisis and hasn’t stopped, more than four years later. ‘I haven’t any other drinking receptacle, dear. This’ll have to do.’ She dumps a generous slug into her half-drunk tea and passes the bottle to Jim.

‘Well, we all change, _Constance,’_ Jim says, tipping the jar to her. ‘Even Bill. Had to change his spots some time.’ There are leftover traces of lime marmalade on the edge of the jar.

He is lonelier, these days. It is beginning to dawn on them all that things are getting worse. The Americans are rattling sabres. The war is in the skies, now, and their enemies are building a wall across Berlin. Things are getting worse, and at the Circus, the humour is getting darker, tinged with a wry fatalistic edge. Control’s brow is more lined, and new people join weekly; Jim doesn’t trust a one of them.

Longer and longer spells away from London. Paris. Tangiers. Months and months in Budapest, until his brain began to recalibrate and to dream in Hungarian. Czecho, a hairy few weeks that ended with two broken ribs and a long scorch mark down his right flank. Sarajevo, in the snow.

On long assignments, interminable flights, he finds himself toying, dangerously, with thoughts of where he might be now. Head of Classics, maybe, at some middling public school somewhere outside Liverpool. Married, probably, a dutiful shag once a fortnight, fond friendship, nothing more, nothing more threatening or heartbreaking.

Television in the evenings, slippered feet, _Crackerjack_ and _Dixon of Dock Green,_ safe and snug, black and white. Bay of Pigs, Sputnik, H-bomb: meaningless phrases intoned on the nightly news and then blissfully forgotten. No sleepless nights.

It is getting harder and harder, but Jim knows it was never really a choice. This is his strange, paranoid family – fated from birth, perhaps – Connie and Toby and Percy and Roy Bland and Smiley. Control the spider in the middle. And Bill – with his new girl and his lengthy assignments in South America, in East Germany – who still makes his heart twitch, and who still feels like home.

*

_Four for a boy_

‘You’re too still,’ his grandfather murmurs. Whispers carry on the air.

‘I don’t want to frighten him.’ There is a treecreeper making its way up a nearby oak.

‘Look at the forest,’ his grandfather says. Jim looks. ‘Is the forest still?’

The faint susurrus of turning leaves. Animals foraging, rustling. A brook, in the distance, leaping over stones. The forest is a heartbeat, a spinal cord. ‘No,’ Jim says.

Jim’s muscles are drawn up taut. His jaw aches from clenching.

‘Just breathe normally,’ his grandfather says, a hand on his back.

It is about hiding in plain sight. Looking so much a part of the scene that wary eyes slide straight over him. He learns to move with the ripples, to be nondescript and unmemorable, even when he grows brawny and tall.

It works as well in the ramshackle, rain-slicked cities of Eastern Europe, as it did in the woodlands and bramble patches of his childhood.

_*_

_Five for silver_

Bill’s mother dies in ’68, and he falls apart, briefly, uncharacteristically. Falls off the radar, too, leaving Bland to keep the balls in the air. A bad time for it, with Brezhnev’s tanks bulldozing their way through Prague.

Jim pretends he is on a scavenging mission from Control – a likely enough lie, but the only anxiety he is truly soothing is his own. Bill cracks open the door of his flat, bleary-eyed and unkempt.

‘Ah, Jim,’ he says, hardly a hint of surprise. His voice scrapes, under-used.

‘You look like death, man.’

Bill shrugs and lets him in. The flat smells stale, weeks-old cigarette smoke and Carnation milk eaten directly from the tin. The surfaces are covered in dirty dishes and unwashed clothes. This is not the Bill Jim has known for thirty years.

‘Rather let myself go, you see.’

Jim hums in agreement. ‘ _FT_ back issues for the past fortnight,’ he says, chucking them on the least cluttered table.

‘Obliged,’ Bill says in a monotone. He is trussed loosely in a scrappy dressing gown, gaping open at the neck. It might be the same one he had at Oxford; only it was new and neat and opulent then, the satin trim gleaming. They used to sprawl on the rug in Bill’s suite at Corpus, arguing about Glenn Miller and Jack Hylton and sometimes Wittgenstein, port-stained teeth, bare feet angled towards each other.

Bill sketched Jim sometimes, though he hated to work in artificial light, and to work in pencil rather than watercolour, and had no great fondness for human subjects. Jim still has one of them, somewhere, slightly crumpled, on the back of the rugby club dinner menu, 1938. He likes how Bill’s rough lines exaggerate the jut of his jaw, and flatter his hairline, and he likes the memory of Bill in that dressing gown, scowling down at his handiwork, saying _next time don’t ply me with Disaronno before you expect me to draw,_ and looking up at him every so often, his eyes full of fire. Another world, really, one where there were no secrets, and old age was unimaginable.

‘D’you rather I went?’

Bill sniffs. His hair falls into his eyes. He is ragged at the edges, unmoored, and Jim doesn’t know what to do with that, alien as it is.

‘Stay, Jimmy, please. Going rather batty, actually. Could do with a friendly face.’

‘Course, Bill. Course.’

Bill turns away and heads back into his bedroom, and Jim follows him, of course.

Bill curls up on the bed, on his side. The curtains are closed, and there are empty bottles littering the bedside cabinet. Jim kicks off his shoes before clambering onto the bed beside him.

‘Good of you to come,’ Bill murmurs into the pillow. The bedclothes smell of sweat and stagnation.

Jim doesn’t know what to say that. If Bill doesn’t know it by now – that Jim will always come, whenever, wherever, no matter the cost – then it is hardly worth saying out loud. Instead, he runs his fingers through Bill’s uncombed hair. _When did it turn silver? When did they become old men?_

‘I didn’t even like the bitch,’ Bill says, muffled. ‘Shipped me off to Ludgrove as soon as she could. Chin up, dear. Big boys don’t cry.’

Instead of saying, _you’re allowed to cry,_ Jim shuffles down the bed until he is aligned against him, hip to hip, toe to toe. The solid pressure of another living body, the buttons of his cardigan along Bill’s spine; he hopes that will be comfort enough.

They have been too busy for each other for years now, really. On the edge of each other’s orbits. Bill is too busy with his briefcase of papers and his revolving door of secretaries and his tiepins. And his shrewd, impatient glare, measuring up the inner circle and biding his time, lining up his dominos, until he can take his place at the head of the table, where he has always belonged. And Jim is busy in alleyways and shady restaurants, in other languages, in leather jackets and shabby caps that mark him out as no one. His hands dirty and his conscience clean.

And yet they come back to each other, always, even after months scattered by Control’s bidding. After international incidents and failed love affairs and blown networks and dead mothers. Pushing fifty, the both of them, bones beginning to creak, scarred inside and out. Old enough to know that this war will never be over; old enough to know they will both die still fighting it. And old habits die hard. Old loves, old promises.

*

_Six for gold_

‘I spoke to Fanshawe,’ Bill says, the morning after the Trinity Commem.

They are both drunk, and neither has slept. Bill’s waistcoat is stained with the remnants of a crème-de-menthe cocktail the captain of boats forced on him hours earlier. Jim has lost his bow-tie, which, as it belongs to Wetherby, is something of a bother.

‘Fanshawe.’

‘Wake up, Jim,’ Bill says sharply.

‘Piss off,’ Jim slurs. There was champagne, somewhere around three in the morning, and it is still fizzing in his bloodstream.

Bill laughs. ‘Fanshawe wants you for the Circus.’

‘I don’t think I’d make much of a performing seal,’ Jim says absently. He is trailing one hand in the water. The sun is rising, staining the river in pink streaks. ‘A bearded lady, perhaps.’

Bill pokes him with his toe.

‘The Circus. You’d be good there.’

‘I always thought I’d teach.’ It’s dawning on Jim that Bill is being serious, and he drags himself upright in the punt, rubbing at his eyes.

‘You can teach after the war.’ There are sandbags all along the High Street, and there are storm-clouds over Europe. It feels like a fairytale, though, a distant, ludicrous prospect: _war._ The balls and exams and tutorials continue without interruption. ‘We’ll need men like you.’

‘We?’ His voice sounds far-off, tinny behind a haze of exhaustion.

‘ _We_.’

‘Can we talk about this when my mind is functioning properly?’

They are drifting idly with the current, any attempt at steering long abandoned. Bill is slumped with Jim in the bottom of the punt, the tip of his thumb tracing the ripples Jim’s fingers leave behind. He lifts his head from the side of the punt and squints at Jim.

‘We don’t ever have to talk about it again, if you’d rather not. Options, though, Jim-boy. Good options.’

‘Good options,’ Jim agrees. They are approaching Magdalen Bridge, and they are alone on the river, except for the birds raucous in the trees overhead.

Jim shuffles down the boat until he is lying flat next to Bill. His dress trousers will be ruined. Bill looks down at him sternly.

‘What are you doing down there?’

Shadows cut across Bill’s face as they pass beneath the bridge. ‘I suppose I’m hoping to be kissed,’ Jim says quietly.  

This is something new; it has happened twice, once in the Corpus cloisters, after nightfall, and once in Jim’s rooms, Jim scrabbling around for his rushed, patchy comparative philology essay, and Bill stepping up behind him, wrapping his arms around his waist and pressing his mouth to the nape of his neck. Jim still feels it weeks later, like a brand, like the heart of a star.

Jim feels suddenly, horribly sober. They are nearly halfway under the bridge, secreted away, and these things are easier in darkness, anyway.

He reaches up to pull Bill down to his level, and presses their mouths together messily. Bill still tastes of crème-de-menthe. The punt pitches wildly with the sudden motion, and Bill clenches a fist in Jim’s lapel to steady himself.

‘ _Christ,’_ Bill hisses against Jim’s lips.

‘God, I’m drunk,’ Jim says dumbly, to steady the raw rush of want. His hands are on Bill’s face, somehow. The river pulls them back into daylight, into view, and Bill sits up fully, his hair askew, glorious.

‘Will you come to my rooms?’ Bill asks, oddly serious.

Jim nods, breath bated. He has been waiting to exhale ever since he met Bill.

‘I want to make love to you properly, you see.’

‘Yes.’ Too quick, too desperate. Jim can’t bring himself to care. Bill will be gone, come autumn, stalking down Shaftesbury Avenue, belonging entirely, just as he has belonged here, between the gargoyles and libraries and dining halls. Bill will be gone, until Jim can follow him, as he always does.

‘Good. Well.’ Bill stands up unsteadily. The punt lurches. Jim reaches out a hand to steady him. He presses his palm against Bill’s thigh and it feels like an anchor and like weightlessness all at once. He wonders whether Bill’s lips are smarting, too.

Bill plants his feet more firmly, and pulls his waistcoat straight. ‘Pass me the pole, Jim-boy,’ he says, reaching down. ‘I’ll have us home in no time.’

Jim settles back against the huff, folding his hands behind his head. The sun has risen properly now, warm on his face. The light plays golden on the Cherwell, dappling when they pass under trees. Bill steers a meandering path along the deserted river. Jim’s head is still spinning. Champagne and no sleep and Bill’s mouth, firm against his, and the gentle rocking of the punt.

‘What are you thinking about?’ Bill asks.

Jim cracks an eye open. Bill – noble captain on the prow of his ship – is silhouetted against the light of morning, huge and solid and wreathed in flame.

‘Oh, nothing very much. What’s yet to come. The Circus. You.’

They have been playing at manhood, until now. The world is on the cusp of something enormous, and so are they. Wild promises of the Circus – the world at his feet – and of Bill – heart bared, skin bared, his and always his, just as soon as they make it back to college – burn hot and brilliant inside his ribcage. Jim closes his eyes again and smiles.

*

_Seven for a secret, never to be told_

A knot settles in Jim’s chest and doesn’t leave.

_There’s a rotten apple, Jim. We have to find it._

He got the better of his pre-op nerves decades ago, but they are back with a vengeance, and they drag him to Bill’s flat. Stupid, reckless plan. His flight leaves in fourteen hours. Bill lets him in, and settles for raised eyebrows when Jim refuses a scotch.

‘Social call?’

Bill is alone in the flat. But there are rumours. Ann Smiley, so the legend goes. Connie’s eyes go soft, whenever she sees Jim. Maybe he’ll invite George out for a mutual drowning of sorrows, once he’s back from Hungary. _Beggarman._

‘I was passing.’ It’s half true, and isn’t that the job: half-truth? ‘Control’s got a bee in his bonnet about something. Can’t say more than that, I’m afraid. It’s big, potentially. You’ll hear about it if it comes to anything, I shouldn’t doubt.’

_Let it be nothing. A wild goose chase, a trail gone cold; just the ramblings of Control’s lunatic, paranoid mind._

‘Dangerous?’ Bill is lighting a cigarette, half-listening. _Tailor._

‘No more than usual. Quick in-and-out, if all goes to plan.’

‘When does it ever go to plan?’

‘When, indeed.’

Here they are, speaking in code. How long has it been, since the words out of their mouths were the words they meant? Here they are.

_Have you made a fool of me, Bill?_ It would be so easy. It would be a relief, to finally slough off his blasted patriotism and his dogged loyalty to Control, and to think only of himself. Himself, and his silly, proud heart. The knot tightens.

‘I’ll see you when you get back, then,’ Bill says. Cloud of smoke.  

‘You owe me a steak supper, I seem to recall.’ Promises, promises. Because of _course_ Control is mistaken, mad, and everything will resume, just as before, Ann Smiley be damned.  

‘You may be right there. How long will you be? I’ll make a reservation at the club.’

Jim stands up. ‘Better hold off on that. I’ll drop you a line when I’m back. Bound to be all sorts of paperwork, anyhow. You’re not off anywhere imminently?’ This is what thirty years of tradecraft brings: the part is easily played, the brave face switched on in a moment. The lies slide so smoothly over the tongue.  

Bill stands, too. ‘Washington, in a few days. Usual Pentagon incompetence. And Percy’s been making noises about some nonsense in Kiev. All hot air, I suspect.’

Jim nods noncommittally. Percy is fussy and pompous, but he works hard and he always takes an interest in Jim’s networks. Percy. _Tinker_. The world, inverted.

There is silence between them. Bill looks younger in the lamplight, out of focus, when what Jim needs now is definition, and truth, whatever that is.

‘I’ll see you when you get back,’ Bill repeats quietly. Unclear who he’s reassuring.

‘Yes,’ Jim says. ‘You will.’ Bill doesn’t say _take care,_ but Jim hears it in his voice. It might be a warning; it could as easily be a blessing.

There is still something left of the Bill Haydon Jim first saw in his tutor’s rooms, slouched insolently against a double-stacked bookshelf, casually certain of his place in the world and of everybody else’s place around him.

‘I feel as though I ought to kiss you,’ Jim says. _Goodbye,_ he doesn’t say. There is very little left of the Jim of Oxford days. Perhaps only brute rage and helpless adoration; the bits of himself he’d rather not keep.

‘I’ve been eating onions,’ Bill says.

Jim smiles, tightly. ‘I’ll forgive you.’

Bill tastes more like ash, and it lingers until much later, when Jim is bleeding to death, lying face down on cool marble tiles half a world away, with the taste of smoke still in his mouth.

*

Jim shifts the rifle onto his bad shoulder and sets off across the field. The magpies fly up before him, and swoop away into the coming dusk.

**Author's Note:**

> Based primarily on film-canon, but odd pieces of book- and miniseries-canon may have sneaked their way in to confuse matters. 
> 
> Happy Yuletide, Morgan! Really hope you enjoy this :) 
> 
> Rachel x


End file.
